We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals. We have to literally embody our emotions if we're going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There's nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it's the only thing we have left.
No, that's not a quote from Renee Good, dead only a week as I type this, but it sure could be, couldn't it? It's from a Greek novel, originally written in 2003, translated and published in English (by good old Open Letter) in 2014. History doesn't only rhyme with itself. Sometimes it rhymes with literature, too.
I, too, grew up with a best friend (though I called another that at the time) for whom I had feelings as strongly hostile as admiring. More than one, actually; my original frienemy, whose mother looked after both my sister and I after school during our elementary years ,moved away just before middle school, leaving me to drift into an almost identically toxic relationship before sixth grade was even halfway over. There's a reason I gnash my teeth at Margaret Atwood's doormat protagonists, who never quite manage to rebel against their more charismatic and domineering friends, only escaping at best, usually only to be re-ensnared later in life when the toxicity has only increased. I'm in this image and I don't like it.
Such a fate looms ever larger for Maria, whose entanglement with the exquisite Anna begins soon after she is taken away from her childhood home in Nigeria (where her exiled Greek expat parents lived comfortably expat lives doing something bourgeois for a living) back to her family's native Athens. At first Maria feels unwelcome and singled out for misery: her classmates hate her. But then a newer new girl joins the class, also the child of returned exiles, but their return is from glamorous, sophisticated Paris, rather than primitive and mysterious Africa. Still, the girls' shared status as outcasts gives them a reason to bond, at least after they clear up a slight misunderstanding about whether or not Maria's parents were nasty, racist, colonial oppressors. They weren't (or, at least, not exactly); friendship saved.
Though this is far from the only misunderstanding that will threaten this pairing over the decades.
For these two girls' families were not expats on a whim, like their American counterparts would be; their parents are leftists who fled into exile in the 70s rather than suffer, or even be killed, under the rule of the Greek Junta aka the Regime of the Colonels.* Anna's father is a famous philosopher, and her mother a ballet dancer, for instance. Maria's parents' leftist bona fides are a little less apparent -- her dad works for an oil company and her mom is kind of a socialite -- but at least they were very kind to their black live-in help, especially Maria's nanny, Gwendolyn, whom in true colonial fashion Maria thought was her actual mother for a while there.
So of course the girls are soon competing with each other over who's the most doctrinaire leftist, who has the best ideas for incorporating good politics into their childish art projects at school, who's going to do greater and more important things when they grow up, and whose mother loves whom more. And yes, eventually the girls' fathers become part of the story, but never a very big part; just enough for us to see that Anna's future husband will be a carbon copy of dear old dad, and for us to see just how much Maria's mother has diminished herself to keep Maria's father happy, giving Maria a negative model of femininity to measure herself against as she goes on to live the life of a bohemian art student and political activist, i.e. neither a wife nor a mother.
And of course they spend some time in young adulthood accusing each other of insincerity, of doubting each other's commitment and effectiveness, while still joyfully reuniting and professing eternal love and best friendship... and Maria watching the prettier and more confident Anna steal pretty much every man Maria has ever had a crush on (and one or two of the women). Friendships as close as this only lack these aspects when there is neither a political nor sexual dimension to the friends' lives, like pretty much no friendship ever.
Someday, if I manage to figure out the why and the how, I'll write a novel. I'll tell the whole story, all that we lived through, from my point of view. I'll let Anna have the title, though: Why I Killed My Best Friend. If you don't feel like reading it, the cover will be enough, you can skip the story: one friend kills another, big deal, human beings are killing one another every day all over the world. Sometimes, to give a logical structure to these conflicts, they fight body to body, hand to hand with the police. Or they fall down the stairs in a metro station without ever having been pushed. They'll even fight themselves, if there's no other worthy opponent around.
"Odiosamato" is the word Maria uses to name her relationship with Anna. I'm no scholar of Greek, ancient or modern, but I think our modern English slang "frienemy" works well enough for it, though I'm pretty sure the Greek, combining "love" and "hate" rather than the somewhat more tepid "friend" and "enemy", deserves to remain in the translated text as it does. As we learn in a translator's note at the end, Karen Emmerich was able to work fairly closely with Michalopoulou on the translation, and Michalopoulou took this opportunity to revise the original a bit. As Emmerich observes, "Careful readers familiar with the Greek may notice some larger-scale changes than translator's usually allow themselves; these were all made with Amanda's consent and involvement." I'm not one of those readers familiar with the Greek, but their keeping of "odiosamato" signals very strongly to me how carefully this work was prepared. As a certain gigantic publisher odiously prepares to end its relationship with translators in favor of letting large language models do it instead, I want here to take a stand against it and in gratitude to the work that only human beings can do with the care and skill and sensitivity required.
But so, the question you're probably asking in your head as I blather about this book is, does Maria actually kill her best friend? But you know me by now; I'm going to tell you to read the damned book. It's an international hit for a reason (and not just for its hints of good praxis, my favorite of which is bringing rainsticks to protests, "which in a pinch can serve as batons to fight the police"), and it's not just for the unflinching honesty with which it portrays female friendship at its most troublesome.
I'm pinching myself for letting this book languish in my ebook library for as long as it did; had I gotten it in a physical edition its various lurid and eye-catching covers would have made it stand out on my shelf, I think. But better late than never, and sometimes, best of all is right now.
*A situation I only just learned of through reading this book. I swear I didn't choose to read this in January 2026 because its background dictatorship reminds me of anything chilly going on right now. Regardless of what the conspirituality types keep insisting, there is such a thing as coincidence. I just wanted to read more contemporary Greek literature, and did my usual trick of going bananas when Open Letter had one of its sales. Which, if you're reading this right when I've posted it, they've got one going on right now. Go bananas! Or baklavas, if you prefer.
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